eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

June 2016

06/25/2016

Louis Brandeis’ 1914 book on “the Money Trust" has too many specifics in it to go on the “easily-read-classic” shelf but if you skim through the evidence to the argument, you begin thinking that you are reading a Bernie Sanders speech. In the course of his essays, Brandeis tries to explain how and why the rich of 1914 were getting richer and how and why the poor were paying them to do it.

Lets take Joe Six Pack. He works hard. He saves a little money. He doesn’t have any idea how to start a profitable business and if he did, the cards are so stacked against him, he can’t. Most of his ideas would somehow put some existing business in danger of making less profit and the owners of those businesses are not interested in competition. They have friends in high places on the boards of all the different banks that might loan Joe some money so, his idea isn’t going to get the credit support it would need to get off the ground.

So, rather than start his own business, he invests in one of the already existing businesses, say a railroad. Here is where his money enters the labyrinth. He will probably be allowed to make just enough interest from his money to discourage him from putting it under his mattress but that is about it. If the railroad company that he invests in does well, it will take its money and put it in a bank that it has business connections with. That bank will take the money and loan it back to the company. At interest. Perhaps it will take the money and it will then buy some steel from another company (at inflated prices). A man on the board of directors of the first company will be on the board of directors for the second company so the money spent will look like a business expense. Ah shucks, the railroad company made less than expected so Joe six pack only gets a little from his investment.

Oddly enough, the same thing will be happening to Jim Sixpack who invests in the steel company. Somehow, the company profits will never pay as much in dividends to the investor as it is to the owner? And it never is going to give a leg up to the employee. Why is that? Brandeis talks about the influence of the banks. They may require that one of their men be placed on the board of directors of any company that wants a loan. And thus, all money loaned seems to keep working for the interests of the few people who own the large financial institutions that give loans. The money invested and saved by millions never seems to “trickle down” to them. It just “trickles back and forth to the folks up at the top.”

Perhaps the secret s to take your money out of the large banks and put it in some venture that will re-invest it into the local community – that will take the people’s savings and loan it to the people for the people’s good? (Like Credit Unions)

That is Brandeis’ idea any way. He trusts the government to break up the banks and the interlocking directorates so that “the little guy” can emerge from his serfdom. It is somewhat of an unspoken axiom of his that the community of business elites are where you will find all the power-hungry greedy people who do not think of the public good but their own good. People working for government, he seems to believe, will naturally be thinking about the public good and not their own personal advancement. I suspect though that there is a breed of people who will follow the money and the power wherever we place it and that he may be trading in one form of dependency for another. But that does not discount his point.

Brandeis certainly has something to say about how the system was not working for common people in 1914 … and today. The problem came down to a problem of trust which was caused by a problem of image versus reality. Large financial institutions had managed to convince people that they were a safe and honest place to put savings and investment monies. And by and large, they were. They granted SOME of the profits of that trust back, but absconded with most of it in the guise of interlocking directorates that siphoned money from the public's account to their own without its being known.

Question for Comment: Who is using your money to make money? What keeps them from just using your money to make themselves money?

It is difficult to see where this movie is heading when it starts, where it is going as it progresses, and where it went, when it ends. But it is always nice to listen to people speaking Italian.

The subject is a young 12 year old girl (Gelsomina) who helps her not terribly parentally gifted parents care for her siblings, migrant workers, house, extended family, and bees. Gelsomina does her work quietly but competently, looking further down the road than her mother seems to be able to look, looking around more perceptively than her sisters can look, and looking out for the bees in ways that maybe even her father is unable to. As the story progresses, it appears that Gelsomina is the central determining factor in whether or not this family will survive. She is only 12 but, and I wish I could honestly say that the writer and director intended this, she is also “her swarm’s” “queen bee.” If it is to survive into a subsequent generation, it will be her doing we suspect.

Question for Comment: Does your family have an MVP? Someone who keeps it working in spite of the others?

06/21/2016

“I love you like the Pilgrim loves the Holy Land, like the wayfarer loves his wayward ways, like the immigrant that I am loves America, and the blind man the memory of his sighted days.”

These lines from the film might well have been spoken of the main character’s graduation year. Four Friends is a eulogy for the sixties, written and produced in 1980. Who knew that the sixties ended when I graduated from high school?

Four high school friends in 1961 (the year before I was born), one by one, surrender all that intoxicating 1960’s wildness inside them. David takes a job with his father in a funeral home. Danilo tries to escape by going to college but eventually winds up in the steel mill. Tom heads off to Vietnam where he has Vietnamese children. Georgia treats the decision to give up on a wild dream as an act of betrayal. She wants her freedom unencumbered. She wants no ties. She wants to be a dancer. She is committed to it and she will not tolerate any unbelief in her entourage of smitten suitors.

By the end of the film, they all sit on a beach as three separate families; each having made somewhat of a cease fire treaty with their inner hippie. Each has been through a difficult process of capitulation. To have a family – to be a parent – requires a willingness to set aside the idealistic self and the love of some crazy idea. Those beliefs in unlimited possibilities must have been an addictive thing in 1962 when all these baby boomers were coming of age. One senses in the movie that their parents were somewhat resentful of the ways that these young people rejected the responsibilities of marriage, family, breadwinning, and parenthood.

Georgia is wildly dedicated to her dream of being a dancer – to be Isadora Duncan – she manages to hold off growing up and settling down as long as she can - surely longer than any of them. Maybe this is what Danilo loves about her. She leads the chant “hit the road, Jack” to the corporate steel mill recruiter but then later says “I'm so tired of being young,” in a moment of weakness. Like a fish on a line, she will continue to resist. “Why does everything take so long?” she asks. We assume that she means the attainment of youthful dreams – the thing that she was sure she was going to do with her life before she devoted herself to the raising of another generation’s chance at their dreams.

In the last lines of the film, these four friends express their devotion to each other. One has already determined to name his future children after themselves, perhaps in the hopes of vicariously attaining what could not be attained through them. Georgia expresses a willingness to move to a college town where her husband will have a full time job “but the next move is hers” she insists – hanging on to the hope of having her own life till the bitter end.

I wonder if everyone who graduated with dreams in the early 60's has a story to tell about how they surrendered it?

Question for Comment: What strange addictable things we humans are. Is there anything in the world that will hang on to something we wanted and surrender something else we want in order to get it as long as we humans will?

06/20/2016

Twenty years ago, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasperov in chess. Five years ago, IBM’s Watson slaughters two Jeopardy champions, demonstrating to us all that even thinking jobs are now at severe risk. The world will soon belong to the programmers and the creators of programs.

Given this assumption, this film’s director asks, what sort of education should kids be getting today? The answer is, as you can suspect, controversial.

I am not a huge fan of the proposition (That the primary role of an educator is to prepare a child for a career) but I am not opposed to the notion that it has to be an important outcome. The fact that someone is asking “what is the end of a good education?” rather than accepting that the answer given a hundred and twenty years ago is THE answer is good enough for me.

Most Likely to Succeed draws a visual contrast between two paradigms of education – In one paradigm, teachers lose autonomy to centralized curricula that are backed up by tests for accountability. In the other teachers are given maximum freedom to provide students with a context in which they can teach themselves as they solve complex problems involving thought, understanding, creativity, talent, engineering, experimentation, collaboration, and applied knowledge. Accountability comes in the form of final projects witnessed by the community.

Success in High Tech High comes down to being able to produce a working solution to a real problem. Assessment is not designed to be easily compared to other classes, other teachers, other schools. “Let computers go to old school classes,” it seems to argue.

Question for Comment: Would you be willing to sacrifice half the content of a traditional high school class in order to give students the opportunity to apply the other half to authentic problems?

I think this is my new favorite western. Right up there with 3:10 to Yuma.

Damned Civil War! I wonder how many romances were wrecked in its catastrophic aftermath?

I am going to let this film speak for itself if you watch it - because I can’t really talk about it without just plot-telling and making connections too personal for a blog post but … I liked this one line where Natalie Portman’s character, Jane Hammond, tells her former fiancé’ Dan Frost,

“You might want to see a day where the sun don’t shine on your story. Cause there is a whole world out there of other people’s tales, if you just care and listen.”

It is just so true that so many of us go through life with the “sun shining on our story.” Where we act as though our story was the story and can’t even see the existence of others.

Question for Comment: If you could get the chance to shine sunlight on someone else’s story who has crossed paths with you in life, whose story would you chose to know more about? In other words, who is someone you would like to explain to you an act that impacted you deeply and that you are still only guessing the reasons for?

“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds, . . . able to see any issue from both sides. Sometimes I flatter myself that this is a talent,” he continues, but “I wonder if what I have should even be called talent. After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you — that is a hazard.”

Viet Thanh Ngoyen’s Pulitzer prize winning novel about the Vietnam War’s impact on Vietnamese people begins by introducing us to an unnamed Vietnamese spy, wring his confession. On many layers he is confused about his identity. Son of a Vietnamese mother he loves and a Catholic priest he despises, born in the North of Vietnam but serving in the South, educated in America in American culture but in love with Vietnam and its culture, serving as a South Vietnamese adjutant to a General, he serves the interests of the communist north by spying for them. He despises the way that American’s portray Vietnamese people in their films about the war and yet serves as a consultant on the biggest Vietnam War blockbuster yet. All the while, he is devoted to two blood brothers from childhood, one a CIA assassin in the Phoenix program, the other a Communist commissar. he can never seem to entirely gain a sense of who he is.

As the New York Time review of the book puts it, “Duality is literally in the protagonist’s blood.”

I thought I was really going to enjoy the book as it promised to introduce me to a person who is a caricature of me in some ways. But I could not finish it. By the time he is captured by his friend Man and tortured into confessing his “sins” it starts to feel like drinking napalm.

And speaking of drinking – I suspect that you could not find a page of this book that does not refer to alcohol. The writer is constantly navigating his way through life with Cognac, Martinis, beer, whiskey, bourbon, wine, vodka, etc. HE uses it to steel himself to acts of violence and betrayal that controvert his moral compass. He uses it to drown the guilt after. He uses it to think and to stop thinking. He uses it to lower inhibitions that he wishes he had not lowered later. Fortunately he has alcohol to atone. One almost senses that, having two selves, he is constantly having to “put one of them down” so as to give the other freedom to act. Alcohol is like a Phoenix program that assassinates some part of himself in his own internal identity Vietnam War.

Someone told me once that “integrity is when what you think, what you feel, what you say, what you do and who you are all come from the same place.” The main character of The Sympathizer is deeply and profoundly integrity impoverished. And he pays.

I wish I could finish the book but – it started crossing lines.

Maybe someday.

Question for Comment: Some people would argue that books and movies are an addictive coping mechanism for dealing with unresolvable tears in the soul. What do you think?

“. . . so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive . . .”

Monsieur Lazhar is an Algerian refugee who has lost his family in an act of state sponsored violence. Moved by a story that he reads in the papers about a 6th grade teacher who has committed suicide in her classroom, he applies for the opportunity to work in the school as a teacher, perhaps hoping to fill the hole that the loss of his own child has left in him.

The school principle, intending to “separate psychotherapy from pedagogy” insists that Monsieur Lazhar leave any discussion about their former teacher to the school psychologist. Throughout the movie, we are given to understand that there are cultural differences between Algeria where Monsieur Lazhar comes from and Quebec where these children live but we also come to understand that there are times where people who have suffered grief have more healing to offer these suffering children than the professional who has simply been trained to work with them.

Monsieur Lazhar understands what the children are dealing with from a deep place of shared loss. He knows that “The dead stay in our heads because we loved them.” He knows that there is great danger in always trying to understand WHY someone we love has gone away or died. He understands that sometimes we need to be given the freedom to speak freely about the grief or guilt that we are feeling even if it is based on inaccuracies. He understands that grieving human beings need physical contact. He understands how important it is for people to say good bye – to explain to those they are leaving behind that the abandonment is not an act of anger, disappointment with them, or lack of care.

“Let the psychologist do her job,” he is told. “Zero tolerance” is the policy when it comes to hugging children. “Get your briefcase at recess,” he is told when his services are no longer required.

Of the many themes that the film explores, about the immigrant experience, about the way that children deal with trauma, about the credentials of teachers, I really love the way that it subtly critiques the fact that school administrators have sometimes professionalized the humanity out of the teacher-student relationship. Students, in my humble opinion, need human adults who happen to be teachers, not just teachers who happen to be human adults.

Question for Comment: It is entirely possible for the relationship between teachers, administrators, and students to be a transactional one – like buying a garden hose at Walmart. We give the lady at the checkout counter money. She lets us out of the store. Sometimes, if we bother to read the name tag, we know their name. If they read our credit card, they know ours. The exchange is a sterile one. Neither party is transformed in any way by the interaction. In transformational relationships there is an exchange of human empathy. There is an attempt to hear the other, to feel their feelings, to see the world through their eyes, to sacrifice a little privacy to know and be known. This film explores how the appropriate limits of that intimacy should be set in institutional life.

What do you think? When you look at the schools (or hospitals or businesses, or churches, etc.) that you interact with, have they become places where humans engage with other humans? Or have they been “Walmartized”?

And when you think about the people that you have left or are leaving? Have you considered how you might communicate with them such you do not leave them with unresolved wounds?

06/07/2016

The story of Will Cooper in Charles Frazier’s Thirteen Moons is a quintessentially American and even more importantly, human story. Will’s narrative of his life is many narratives combined. It is a story of aging (Will’s story takes us through nine decades). Thirteen Moons is a rags to riches story (Will goes from orphan to Senator). Thirteen Moons is a story of conflicted identities (Will is a white boy living in the middle of Cherokee country who is adopted into the tribe). Thirteen Moons is a story of the eternal struggle for justice (Will puts himself square in the middle of the legal battle for Cherokee land that erupted when Andrew Jackson became President). Thirteen Moons is a grand historical story of America’s expansion between the Revolutionary War and the closing of the frontier. Thirteen Moons is a story of technological change from an era of horses and trails in the forest to an era of steam, telephones, and modern contrivances. It includes massacres, real estate deals, forced migrations, and even genocide.

But these are all incidental to Will Cooper’s life. All. In the end, Thirteen Moons is a story of human love, found, lost, and pined for. For no matter how many events that Will Cooper has to tell us about in this autobiographical novel of one man’s exciting life – no matter how many riveting mini-stories about horse thievery, gambling, drunkenness, fraud, politics, war, language barriers, business deals, high finance, duels, murder, killer cold, slavery, friendship, aboriginal rites, travel, betrayal, abandonment, magic, religion, and survival he includes, the central theme of his life is the unending unquenchable love for a girl that he met ever so briefly when he was eleven years old.

Thirteen Moons is a story about the eternality of desire and connection. And Will is not ashamed to say it often enough that the reader can never forget it. Early in the novel, he tells the reader about his identification with Launcelot in the Arthurian Legends.

“Choosing incorrectly means losing all. I turn the pages and read on, hoping Lancelot will choose better if given one more chance. I want him to claim love over everything, but so far he has failed. How many more chances will I be able to give him? The gist of the story is that even when all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning. One of the few welcome lessons age teaches is that only desire trumps time.”

His desire as a boy that Lancelot would not sacrifice his love for Guinevere for the ideals of Arthur’s kingdom foreshadows the way that Will himself will later let the love of his life go because of his commitment to his adoptive father’s Cherokee homeland. His account of his life is rich with experiences, adventures, and personalities but it can never stray far from the central question of his life: “How might I have hung on to Claire Featherstone?” Only she and his father Drowning Bear are what he calls, “singularities.” Here some excerpts of this refrain assembled from scattered chapters together into an anthology:

“Survive long enough and you get to a far point in your life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen. After that, if you don't watch out, you can spend all your time tallying your losses and gains in endless narrative. All you love has fled or been taken away. Everything falling from you except the possibility of jolting an unforewarned memory springing out of the dark, rushing over you with the velocity of heartbreak. May walking down the hall humming an old song – ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me" – or the near fragrance of cloves in spiced tea can set you weeping and howling when all you've been for weeks on end is numb.”

“We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null. Shed our past life like a pair of wet and muddy trousers, just roll their heavy clinging fabric down our legs and step away. We also reach a point where we would give the rest of our withering days for the month of July in our 17th year. But no thread of Adriadne exists to lead us back there.” [Note: Ariadne was the mythological character that unspooled a thread in the labyrinth so that she could find her way back out of its inscrutable maze.]

“Except for my little sick mother, I had no experience with love in my life, neither incoming nor outgoing. Lately, since love had seemed in impossibility, I had steeled myself against it. But I held Claire, and that was that forever. Something was sealed. Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots.”

“More than once I went and buried my face in the coats lining, and every time the smell of lavender was fainter than before. As if the girl who had stood within its compass was fading from the world.”

Without going into great detail, the young Will Cooper “wins” Claire in a game of poker when he is eleven. Their meeting is so brief there are barely words exchanged but he never forgets her. They are reunited for a few months as teenagers and then separated again for almost all his long life. Through all his life, she remains “the pearl of great price” – that thing that takes all the color out of all other things, all other people, all other travels.

"Decades later in life, deep into aching middle-age, I held deeds to most of the land I then saw [from the top of a mountain he stands on with Claire at 17], all the way to the longest horizon, stacks of paper saying all that summer country was mine. But of course, all the paper in the world was nothing in comparison to those three days."

His “Lancelot moment” occurs at a moment in time when Will’s services to his adoptive Cherokee clan is absolutely essential to them. If he leaves with her, his father’s entire clan must leave their ancestral homeland for Oklahoma forever. It is a loaded moment that Andrew Jackson has forced upon them all (Will says that he wishes he had shot Jackson when he had had the chance). Claire and Will almost escape the gravitational pull of his filial obligation to his adoptive father, Drowning Bear. Their attempt seems almost like a rocket ship trying to escape earth’s atmosphere and coming within inches. Frazier symbolizes the attempt perfectly in a late night horseback ride where the teens contemplate just running away to Georgia and getting married.

“I looked around and Claire had loosed her hair from it's binding, and it too was whipping long behind, and her dress skirt was blowing back, flaring like a comets tail, as if that sweep of hair and skirt was all the effect the resistance of the world could have on us as we streaked through the night in a moment that I could not then know was unrepeatable.”

“We didn't go to Georgia, not the next day or ever. And I'm not sure how my life would've worked out differently if we had.”

Soon after, she sits on a wagon heading to the new Indian lands she and her “father” are being forced to move to and pleads with Will to come with her. Wild horses of attachment pull Will apart. His girlfriend – his father – his tribe – his business – his career – his homeland. You can almost hear the sound of a soul tearing.

“Claire was just solid gone.”

Will is left to calculate what he should have done or could have done for the rest of his life. “We could not allow a wide place in the trail to pass without riding alongside each other and letting our hands touch,” he reminisces of their glorious July trip to the mountains together,

“. . . At such a moment of conclusion later in life, I would inevitably have felt a sense of failure, and overwhelming gloom in the knowledge that days such as those three were done and gone forever. But back then I simply exulted in the false but glorious knowledge that life would be exactly this way from now on. I wasn't different from anybody else. I took youth as a special pact with God.”

“. . . Even in old age, she recurs. I still dream about Claire at least twice a year. How amazing for a thing as vaporous as desire to survive against all the depredations of time, becoming, at its worst, a sad reminder that life mostly fails us. In some dreams she is just a fragrance.”

“. . . There are many who can make new selves at a moment’s notice. Slough a skin, dismiss memory, Move on. But that is not a skill I ever acquired.”

“. . . I hesitated. I'm not proud to report it. It was my Lancelot moment. Hesitate to get in the cart, and you are lost. Maybe every life has one moment where everything could have been different if you had climbed on the cart.”

“. . . Now I think, what more could she have said? And for so long I have hated my nature for failing to say what I felt. And most of all for not acting on it. You live with such choices until you die. They eat it you like heartworm, coring you out until you are just a skin enclosing nothing. A balloon filled with hot breath.”

“. . . That moment has haunted me all my life. Her sitting on the tailboard of the wagon, going away, the driver rattling the reigns and the mules pulling on the wooden members of the wagon rubbing and rattling against one another as the wheels roll through the mud. Claire bending her head and her hair falling over her face like drawing curtains across a bright window. And me saying nothing. Doing nothing. I was a young man, but I believed my best life was over.”

“We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken off ends of true people,” Frazier concludes through Will’s reflections as an old man. “It is the severe vengeance creation takes on us for living.” Though he has experienced injustice on a massive scale (study the story of the Cherokee in American history if you have never seen what injustice looks like) it is the circumstances that took Claire from him that so profoundly disturb his theology. “When did fairness ever rule our lives?” he asks of those factors that tore them apart, “It is best not to study too much on who gets what they deserve. It can lead to an overly complicated interpretation of God's personal attributes.”

The words Will uses to describe his involuntary reaction to Cherokee sacred space applies to the way that his soul and hers seem “knit together.” “A reaction of spirit as involuntary as a doctor striking beneath your knee with a rubber mallet.” There is a passage early in the novel where Claire gives Will a love patient she has purchased from the local Cherokee “herbalist” that gives you a sense of the way that he attributes something mystical to the attachment.

“The powder had no taste whatsoever, but her palm was salty.”

“Now you are meant to always want to me, she said.”

“I didn't doubt it, neither then nor now. I don't know what that powder was. Dried herbs and roots and mushrooms and fungus and bear gall ground in a mortar and pestle. Or something similar. I've never put much stock in the powder. But I believe the words entered me and changed me and still work in me. The words eat me and sustain me. And when I am dead and in a box in the dark dark ground, and all my various souls have died and I am nothing but insensible bones, something in the marrow will still feel yearning desire persisting beyond flesh.”

“How come I'm still in love with you?” he will ask her so many many decades later when the currents of life bring them momentarily together again.

“One of the mysteries” she says.

And Will Cooper lives on – hoping that someday, maybe she will at least come back and be buried in a grave next to his own and his horse, Waverly, who had tried so valiantly to help them escape the pull of their lives’ inevitable responsibilities. Maybe next time, I can imagine him wondering, the ghost of Waverly will succeed.

“I can admit now that I entertained the pipe dream that circumstances would someday lead Claire to live with us and eventually join us in the upper pasture so that in some way our night ride together long ago might never end. . . . Claire was still immediately the same to me, a recognition deep past the point of heartbreak.”

06/04/2016

All marriages hit dark ice sometimes. One hopes and prays that they will pull out. In this film, Fiona and Ben, an Australian couple traveling to India to adopt a child face a series of challenges to their relationship that often accompany phase transitions in a family’s evolution. There are a lot of small things that go into making marriage work and thus there are a lot of things that can go wrong, particularly when a significant restructuring is in the works. This couple seems to know that they have been good together but, will they still be with new responsibilities? Fiona brings her work with her to India and Ben sometimes resents her distracted attention. Ben runs into an old “acquaintance” who seems to reflect his more laid back style and one senses the seed of jealousy planted. Both are dealing with the stress of dislocation and the insecurity of not knowing if they will make good parents. We begin to feel problems of money, problems of physical intimacy, problems of personality, problems of childrearing, problems of health, problems of spirituality, problems of trust.

As they contemplate taking on the work of childrearing, they have to recalculate their trust in one another. IN many ways, they are changing and they must learn who their changed partner is as they themselves are changing.

It is not easy.

But how would I know?

Question for Comment: Have you ever had to re-calculate whether or not a relationship that worked would still work after one or both of you changed in some significant way? Or your life did?